HEEDFUL
“Hospitals in Ukraine are being battered by artillery and airstrikes with increasing frequency. The World Health Organization said that as of March 30, it had verified 82 incidents of attacks on health care since Russia invaded Ukraine, causing 72 deaths and 43 injuries.”
-The Washington Post, April 4, 2022
Bold-aged, heedful in our fabric,
We will tomorrow-face
Your ravening salvos, triage
Your unasked incoming.
If you’d lop nurses’ lives,
we cannot unlimb them.
Take rather
Our caduceus-carved columns.
If you’d hush doctors’ hearts,
We must unstill them.
Ravage instead
These wrought Tsarist angels.
And if you’d seize patients’ souls,
Cleave cornices only.
Let our friezes
Stand hostage.
RAKING
These wet leaves
Submerged boggy in garden soil,
Then heaped beneath the rake,
Pant to be tilth,
Crave to birth,
Are already pushing,
Loam-bedded under cuticle,
Loop of palm, whorl of thumb.
Mike Reis is a writer and environmental historian who has had poems published in The Galway Review, Crossways, Gargoyle, Lucille, Urthkin, The Archer, Laughing Bear, Grand Little Things, North of Oxford, The Broadkill Review, The Raven’s Perch, the Amelia poetry postcard series, and Cabin Fever, the anthology of the Joaquin Miller Cabin Poetry Series
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